‍

John Doerr is the renowned investor and Chairman of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. He is widely acknowledged to be responsible for the spread of the OKR system though Silicon Valley.

‍
Doerr first learnt about OKRs in the 1970s while working as an intern at Intel under the legendary Andy Grove who, as Doerr says in this talk, has been called ‘the greatest manager of his or of any other era’. Doerr introduced the founders of Google to OKRs after investing $12 million in the one-year-old startup for Kleiner in 1999. Since then, he has helped dozens of companies adopt the system – including Dropbox, Spotify, LinkedIn and Twitter.

‍
In this engaging 2018 TED talk, Doerr argues that we fail to achieve our goals because we do not set the right goals in the first place. He walks us through the fundamentals of OKRs and explains how the goal-setting system can drive us towards positive change and help us face even the world’s toughest challenges, from global poverty to disease. Using healthcare technology company Nuna’s founder, Jini Kim, and Bono’s ONE organisation as examples, Doerr argues that we need to ask not only What? (objectives) and How? (key results), but also Why? (our purpose). ‘Truly transformational teams combine their ambitions [with] their passions and their purpose,’ says Doerr.

‍
This inspirational eleven-minute video is an opportunity to see the great man in action (and to see a short video clip of Andy Grove himself) and is a particularly good resource if you’re looking to galvanise a team adopting OKRs.

‍